President Joe Biden’s budget proposal released Monday calls for a “historic” $88.2 billion to prepare for “future biological threats.”
The “mandatory funding” would be distributed, over the course of five years, among the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Department of State, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
According to the proposal published by the White House on Monday, “The Biden-Harris administration has made great progress in combating COVID-19 and building better health security to protect against future pandemics and other health emergencies. However, much more is needed to prevent future biological catastrophes.”
That “much more” includes the following:
$40 billion is proposed to be sent to the HHS/ASPR to invest in advanced development and manufacturing of “countermeasures for high priority threats and viral families,” such as vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and personal protective equipment (PPE).
The proposal added that those funds would be used “towards the ambitious goals” of developing vaccines and therapeutics within just 100 days of identifying a biological threat. Within 130 days, the president wants to produce enough vaccines for all Americans and even support “surge production to rapidly meet global needs.”
In other words, the vaccine trials for the new biological threats would be developed and tested for some three months before becoming available to the public.
Then, the budget proposal includes $28 billion for the CDC “to enhance public health system infrastructure, domestic and global threat surveillance, public health workforce development, public health laboratory capacity, and global health security.” Most likely, the funds would be used in foreign and domestic biolaboratories to study “potential biological threats,” as was done in Wuhan, China.
The money would also be utilized to “modernize public health data collection.” It has been common knowledge that data collection and its production is challenging for the CDC. Recently, the nation’s top healthcare agency was found to have miscalculated critical COVID-related statistics. In some cases, the agency deliberately withheld data over political concerns.
The proposal suggests that if the agency receives more funds, it will help it with forecasting future threats. One could argue that that would be more easily achieved by monitoring the grants of the Department of Defense (DOD), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and its subordinate, the National Institute of Allergic and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Speaking of which, Biden will ask Congress to allocate $12.1 billion to the NIH “for research and development of vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics against high priority biological threats.”
That point of the plan mentioned that the Covid vaccines were created thanks to “twenty years of prior federally funded scientific research on coronaviruses.” Now, the NIH should continue its research to ensure that the vaccines against the “priority viral families” can be made in just 100 days.
An additional $1.8 billion would be spent to make sure the research on the “biological threats” is done safely.
$1.6 billion is proposed to be given to the FDA to “modernize and streamline” its infrastructure, which, presumably, would hasten the approval of vaccines developed at lightning speed.
Last but not least, Biden wants $6.5 billion to be spent to “transform global health security and pandemic preparedness” for Covid variants and whatever other biological threats could emerge.
The president argues that because “a biological threat anywhere can turn into a health emergency everywhere,” the Department of State and USAID should be working on establishing a global structure that would address biological threats.
Of those funds, $500 million would be given to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). This organization, whose motto is “New vaccines for a safer world,” was launched in 2017 by the World Economic Forum (WEF) with the money of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation “to finance independent research projects to develop vaccines against emerging infectious diseases.” It comes as no surprise that the Biden administration views it as a major player in its global strategy.
Citing the warning that future Covid variants “could have severe consequences for U.S. health and livelihoods,” the proposal reminded us that the Biden administration has launched the Pandemic Innovation Task Force, tasked with developing tools to tackle future pandemics.
The proposal concludes that, collectively, these “activities” will create capabilities America “urgently needs” to respond to future pandemics and other biological threats.
As reported by The New American, the Biden administration unveiled a new COVID “preparedness plan” for its next phase of the pandemic response earlier this month. The strategy is based on four pillars: protecting against and treating Americans for COVID, preparing for the new COVID variants, preventing economic shutdowns, and leading the effort to “vaccinate the world.”
The plan’s goal is to “stay ahead of the virus” by “rely[ing] on the powerful layers of protection” that are already available and by “invest[ing] in the next generation of tools” needed to address the emerging variants.
The current proposal appears to be much more costly than Biden’s previous plans.
Back in September 2021, the Biden administration put forward a plan for $65.3 billion for pandemic preparedness, to be spent over seven to 10 years, but Congress has not acted on that proposal.
The bipartisan PREVENT Pandemics Act is currently moving through the U.S. Senate. The measure is estimated to cost $100 billion in the first year, $20 billion to $30 billion in the following two years, and $10 billion to $15 billion annually thereafter, per the Rockefeller Foundation. It does not include the just-unveiled major funding proposal.
